Sunday, November 05, 2006

Nick sinks ever deeper

My memory of what Nick has said in the past may be a bit hazy, but I think it had something to do with pursuing the moral course even when it conflicts with national interest. To those who said that Iraq should be left to Saddam on the grounds that he didn’t pose much of a threat to us, Nick replied with sermons about the indivisibility of morality and the need for solidarity with torturer’s victims.

A basic, perhaps the most basic, principle of human rights is that people have the right not to be tortured.

Nick first flirts with Dershowitz-style “ticking bomb” scenarios. Truly, this alone is a sign that he has sunk deep into a poison pit. But the final para of this week’s abomination commends the robust attitude of the French (the French!). They don’t let concern for fundamental human rights get in the way of pursuing their national interest, so why should we, asks Nick? Well Nick, don’t you remember ? This was why the French didn’t get involved in your great moral crusade in Iraq.

If only Nick had woken up earlier, we could have saved ourselves a good deal of grief. There were all kinds of Iraqis hanging around the UK in the 1980s and 90s, some of them were troublemakers. Perhaps we should have sent some of them back home in return for an assurance from the the secular authoritarians in Iraq that they would treat them nicely? An obscene suggestion? You bet. So why is Nick now commending the deportation of people to the prisons of the secular authoritarians in Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Jordan?

Or is that what he’s saying? Remember last week’s pop at Ian Buruma? The bit where Nick wrote:

There is a revealing slipperiness in that sentence: the use of “one can’t help sensing” instead of “I think”….

This week’s weaselling is coated in the “revealing slipperiness” of “I suspect” as in:

I suspect it is going to be hard to say automatically that what the authorities want to do is wrong.

It's not very heroic of Nick to argue that we should allow johnny foreigner to torture on our behalf without having the guts to propose basic honesty: that torture should become the national policy of the Great British democracy.

I'm genuinely confused as to why Decency seems to lead to complete political and moral collapse. Is it inherent in the posture, or is Decency only a necessary pit-stop for Sparts of yesterday becoming Dacres of tomorrow?